In introducing the subject, Holmes states that he has “occasionally met with something like it in books, somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, ... and in one of the works of Mr. Olmstead.”
When one considers the obvious poetic appeal of this psychic phenomenon as exemplified in the touching expressions we have just quoted, it seems strange that the older writers made no use of it.
Even omniscient Shakespeare, although odorous images and allusions are not uncommon in his works, seems to have overlooked this sportive trick of the sense. Otherwise we might have had Lady Macbeth sleep-walking because her nightposset exhaled the vapour of the draught she had drugged Duncan’s guards with.
Several seventeenth century writers make a general reference to odours as “strengthening the memory.” Here is one for which I am indebted to my friend F. W. Watkyn-Thomas:
“Olfactus (loq.)—
Hence do I likewise minister perfume
Unto the neighbour brain, perfume of force,
To cleanse your head, and make your fancy bright
To refine wit and sharp invention,
And strengthen memory: from whence it came
That old devotion incense did ordain
To make man’s spirit more apt for things divine....”
(“Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses,” Act IV., Sc. 5, Anthony Brewer (circa 1600): Dodsley’s “Old Plays,” Vol. V., p. 179, 1825.)
And Montaigne may be alluding to it when he says:
“Physicians might (in my opinion) draw more use and good from odours than they do. For myself have often perceived, that according unto their strength and qualitie, they change and alter, and move my spirit, and worke strange effects in me: Which makes me approve the common saying, that invention of incense and perfumes in Churches, so ancient and so far-dispersed throughout all nations and religions, had an especiall regard to rejoyce, to comfort, to quicken and to rowze and to purifie our senses, ...”
The Jacobean herbalists and therapeutists in general, as we shall see later on, frequently credit aromatics with the power of strengthening the memory. But, so far as my reading goes, I have failed to find a clear and unmistakable description of this peculiar phenomenon in any writer prior to the nineteenth century. It is, of course, difficult to prove a negative, and so it would not be surprising if some such allusion were to be dug up. But even then the wonder would remain that it had attracted little, if any, attention from others. As a matter of fact, mental happenings of this order did not interest our forebears much. Shakespeare is the exception to this statement, and that is one of his claims to greatness.
Moreover, quite apart from this particular, the writings of the old English poets and of such French and German authors as I am acquainted with, seem curiously deficient in references to all but the more gross and obvious phenomena of olfaction, and these are most frequently of the farcical order, a little too gross and obvious for modern readers.
Since Dickens’s time, however, we have had almost too much literary odour.